Seen many tornadoes - - they are lovely until they hit the ground and turn black. The most serious such event I didn't see as the sky (in the country) was absolutely black. no light penetrated the thick clouds of the storm and the power went down. Just wind driven black rain slamming into the windows was deafening as we all took refuge in the basement bathroom in a corner of a tiny farm-house. The next morning, a farmer just down the road was missing a barn door. He never found it. The tornado hit a few miles away. Another (fun) event was when I was in Devils Lake ND. I was upstairs chatting with my landlord when a high wind hit and water came shooting into his living room through the top of his screen door (strange as he had a 6 foot covered porch protecting it). It was like someone had a fire hose aimed at his front door. After the wind gust (microburst) the shed in the back yard had flown up over the power lines and smashed his neighbors car parked in the back yard. I drove around town to find out what happened and a few buildling had simply gone away. At what was a large electric motor shop, the only thing left was solid steel table with a large motor in the center of a concrete floor. All other traces of the building were nowhere to be seen. Roof sections were missing on many buildings, the plastic surrounds on street lights were shattered but my favorite was a hotel on the west side of town. . . people on the first floor called in to complain that the people above them had left the water running as water was coming through the ceiling. . . . The entire second story was blown off the first floor and peeled back like someone had opened a sardine can.

The Hurricane Elvis Derecho of July of 2003. Winds reached the speeds of a Cat 2 hurricane and hundreds of thousands were without power, some for weeks and weeks. The formation of the storms were so intense that the radar took on the appearance of a fully-formed cyclonic system with fronts and zones. This storm was terrifying, and knocked down thousands of huge trees.